AS media Amelia Harrington

Wednesday, 30 April 2014

Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now is mind-bendingly creepy. It's alternately a haunting meditation on grief and a supernatural spookfest -- one that stays in your mind long after the credits roll. After the tragic death of their daughter, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) move to Venice, where John works to restore a historically significant church. But it seems their dead daughter is haunting the canals and alleyways of their newly-adopted city -- and a series of suspicious murders has unnerved the locals.

The slasher subgenre owes its existence to Psycho, though Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece is worlds deeper than the gorefests that came in its wake. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is one of cinema's most tortured antagonists -- he's a lonely mama's boy with a domineering mother, and his murderous impulses can be attributed to a seriously damaged psyche. Hitchcock's genius is that his antihero's behavior elicits some seriously conflicting emotions -- do we fear Norman, or pity him? Therein lies the beauty of the psychological thriller, the way it challenges our perception of the narrative and the characters contained within. It's all in a day's work for the Master of Suspense.